Thanks to lots of stress at work, my back is in a right state. The ache starts just above my arse and doesn't stop until the top of my neck. This is not good. Just what is the best position to sleep in with an sore back? At the moment I am trying to lay on my back, stretched out, but thats not very comfortable, so I'm tired as well... :(

Just to make it worse, my "asthma" is getting bad again for the first time in three years. I hope it doesn't carry on getting worse...

Scribe

Scribe is the provisional name for my Dublin Core metadata editor. Python + GTK 2 + pluggable DC sources sounds like a good plan. There are specifications on embedding Dublin Core into HTML, and examples of into PNG, so I don't have to do too much thinking for the primary targets. All I have to do now is think up the architecture, and then start coding. If anyone is interested, please shout.

Counting Crows

Today I bought Hard Candy, their 4th album. Not a bad album, but still nowhere near as good as August and Everything After, which was just sublime. Shame.

For the first time in a long time, my girlfriend and I had a weekend where neither us were being savaged by hay fever, flu, back ache or work. This felt remarkably good, so I celebrated by refusing to turn my computer on until the early evening for a quick "when is the new Counting Crows album coming out" check (next week, dammit). Saturday was a good day -- long chats in pubs, a bit of shopping, laughing, cooking, followed by red wine and Best Of Luis Theroux in the evening.

Coding

Now that I finally have some web space to go with my domain, I can start putting some content up. This led to my routine adventure into metadata...

I want to keep a collection of screenshots and photos online, as we all do. I'm against 100 files, all called screenshot-43.png, so some form of index is required. I'm also against information being in the wrong place, i.e. in a seperate file. The only file which knows what am image is about, is the image. A quick peek at the PNG specification confirmed that the text chunks are have keywords associated with them, so a PNG image can have a creation date, title, author etc.

So, all I need is:

A CGI script which can examine a directory, scan the metadata, and create a titled, date sorted index

A nice GUI tool to edit said metadata

(1) I could code up in a day or so if Apache Cocoon 2 were installed on the server, and I still had my love for Java. Cocoon2 is a wonderful piece of software, and excellent for this sort of thing. However, its too heavy for a single directory... does anyone know of a tool which does this? Or should I just sit down and write it in Python myself...

(2) I suppose needs writing — I remember a Java tool written by a Dublin Core dude, but that only handled JPEG images. I'm thinking Python + GTK + Bonobo + gnome-vfs should be good, and handle the file opening and viewing nicely. Drop in a few objects and edit the metadata of any file desired. All I need now is for jamesh to add the application stuff from gnome-vfs to the GNOME bindings for Python... :-)

Well, it's official then. I am the new maintainer for gnome-games. It's all very exciting, getting cvs commit access to gnome.org and committing my first (2-line) bug fix for gnome-games 2.0.1.

Speaking of which, I just found out that GNOME 2.0 RC2 has just been announced. Getting close... can't wait until Ximian release packages so we can roll it out across the office. I just can't stand using GNOME 1 any more...

Books

Recently I finished The Two Towers, and cannot wait for the film to be released this Christmas. Last week I started reading Neuromancer, a book I read every few years forgetting how good it is...

So hadess looked at the
gnome-games patches I sent him over the weekend.
Damn, they sucked. A simple task I set out to do and I
totally forgot to fix several cases of the problem. He
finished the fixes and committed, but I still have some
uncommitted changes on my checkout. So now I am going to
run through my other changes and make sure that I can play
at least one round in every game, dammit. I can
make a good patch.

Evolution

I just installed the Ximian Evolution development
snapshots... and damn are they nice. Many lovely 1.2
features and lots of new bugs. Something about me likes a
mail client which crashes now and again... I must be mad.

Now, I'm not what you would normally describe as a
Monarchist (the whole 'as chosen by God' thing, where God
changes over time -- see Henry 8th -- pisses me off a bit),
but a 4-day weekend is really great fun.

I feel much less stressed now -- I think I can even stand
upright against a wall again without aching, which is always
a good sign.

GNOME 2

...is frozen for 2.0.0! Yay! Another yay is for the panel
padding, which got removed at the last minute, thank
goodness. I just hope that gnome-terminal will be able to
copy+paste multiple lines by 2.0.0, as its currently broken
for me with libzvt 0.117.0. :(

Recently I've been using more software from GNOME2 on my
desktop at home, which has an interesting
setup. As a result software which makes assumptions like
'libgnomeui prefix == my install prefix' breaks. As a
result I fixed these bugs in eog and
gnome-games.
At the same time my anal-ness resulting in me filing
patches calling gtk_window_set_transient_for() more
so that dialogs don't appear in the top-left corner of the
screen under Metacity, but centered on the parent window
where they belong.

Dear God... my GNOME2 setup is now a cocktail of Debian
Sid packages, Debian Experimental packages,
garnome, and jhbuild. This is getting
silly but it is much faster — as I don't have to build the
core libraries myself but simply use the Debian packages.
Details of this procedure are on my
web space. (well, will be when I put it there)

GNOME2 is really looking polished now —
Gman, Calum et al are really working hard
in #ui-review cleaning up the interface.

DebianUpdate

My DebianUpdate script is complete UI-wise but is missing
one function — the ability to analyse the apt
repository and decide what updates are required... Has
anyone out there used Python with the apt libraries?

My small tool to assist in Debian upgrades is ready for a
0.1 release. Basically it lists the packages for which there
are upgrades (it currently processes an apt-get
dist-upgrade command) and lets the user select which
upgrades he wants to apply. It will then generate a script
to download/install the selected upgrade (either directly
with apt-get, or a script using ncftpget.

I find this very usefull as I can generate scripts at
home (dialup connection) to download package upgrades I want
(ignoreing ones I don't) which I can take to work and run
there (256K leased line). Hopefully I can get this online
over the weekend.

Garnome

I've checked out Garnome from CVS now so I can generate
patches adding GTKMM and Gnome-Python support. These patches
are trivial but they will help spread the word as it were,
and help get stuff ported. Expect them online over the
weekend aswell.

GTK+ in Python

Python and GTK+ so rock. I've been working on an adapter
class which makes a GtkTreeModel look like a Python list.
There are some major limitations (its not a tree, just a
list) but it's very handy being able to treat a GtkTreeModel
as a list:

for item in model:
# Here item is the object which represents
# the row in the model. How cool is this!

I'm using a descriptor object which tells the
GtkListModel class how to map between rows/columns
in the tree and attributes on an arbitary object. Very
groovy.

As with everything else, I'm going to finish this off
soon and push it online somewhere. Damn I need some good
webspace.

Flamage in gtkmm-list

There has been some heavy bitching in gtkmm-list for the
last few days. Nothing as bad as the "viewports/workspaces"
threads in desktop-devel which have been very
annoying, but it was amusing watching the definition of "a
C++ progammer" used as flameage.